What evidence is Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” based on?

Like many people I thought it was a well-established piece of psychology. Robyn Dawes doesn’t agree. In “House of Cards” he writes the following:
“[…] professional psychologists make claims to be experts not only in problems of mental illness but in knowing what constitutes the good life in general (“We are teachers …”). Again, they have established this authority in part by reaching “expert” conclusions that are compatible with what people generally believe anyway. For example, Abraham Maslow’s “needs hierarchy” and Erik Erikson’s hierarchy of childhood stages have become so accepted in our culture that people often refer to them as if they were established facts. Yet the evidence supporting their existence is scant. A true hierarchical structure implies fundamental asymmetries; it is impossible to reach a higher stage without reaching lower stages – often at an earlier point in time. The slender research evidence for the existence of these hierarchies could often by restated with the generalization that “good things in life occur in loose clumps, as do bad things.” That generalization should not be surprising given the existence of positive feedback between what people do, how they feel about themselves, and the future opportunities available to them.”

The next two paragraphs don’t really touch on Maslow, but they’re interesting enough that I’ll copy them. The following is all quotes from Dawes that I don’t feel like putting in quotation marks.

Some hierarchies do exist. The negative behaviors of aggressive young boys, for example, fall in a neat hierarchical pattern; they do not engage in or attempt physical abuse of their parents and siblings unless they also have “fights” with them using verbal abuse and humiliation. Without the latter behavior, they do not engage in the former. [This is not an ironic claim absent evidence, the citation is to a paper by Patterson & Dawes, 1975] My point is, however, that we too readily postulate hierarchies of behavior and feelings (or spiritual “levels”) in the absence of much evidence. When professionals espouse such hierarchies they are quickly believed and their ideas are acceptable. Hierarchies exist in almost all societies and organizations, and many major Western philosophers have proposed that the soul is – or ought to be – hierarchically ordered as well. Plato explicitly proposed that the hierarchies of the well-ordered soul and the well-ordered society should be identical; the lowest level of the soul consisted of the animal functions (the producers in a society), the medium level of the spirited functions (the warriors in a society), and the highest level of the rational functions (the philosopher king rulers of a society). Problems for either an individual or a society arose when the hierarchy was disturbed by the “lower” functions disrupting the higher ones. People and societies got “carried away” by greed (animal desires, the lowest of all) or ambition (slightly higher) to behave irrationally. Aristotle was a little less keen about spirited functions, so when he ordered the soul hierarchically, the progression was from passive (“vegetative”) animal functions to active ones to – once again – reason. The Catholic Church retained the hierarchical structure of the soul, so that the highest level consisted of the “pure” love of Christ and God, and the lowest level consisted of impure lust for the sensual and material things of the earth – to the point that a celibacy (or “virginity”) and asceticism were common among devout Christians at a very early date. Freudian psychology contains two hierarchies: the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious; and the id, ego , and superego. Moreover, these Freudian hierarchies interact; the defense mechanisms consist of the unconscious part of the ego, even though they were preconscious at the time they were established. Such “spatial paralogic” is appealing to many people for reasons that are not entirely clear (as the reason for the ubiquity of three levels is unclear); what is clear is that people very often code the world in such terms, as Clinton DeSoto and his colleagues have demonstrated. The mental health professionals who discuss life in general often affirm the existence of such hierarchies, usually in terms of quality of “mental health.”
Not only are hierarchies of life accepted for their compatibility with the way people normally think, they have the further motivational appeal that they deny the sometimes painful necessity of making tradeoffs in life, of forgoing some valued outcomes or behaviors in favor of others, because achieving a higher state in a hierarchy implies having achieved everything that is valuable in lower ones; hence, people do not have to forgo anything in achieving a higher state. Hierarchies deny, moreover that societies are not just “higher” or “lower (“primitive”) in relation to one another; some provide political and economic rights to their members (like personal freedom, autonomy, and opportunity for self-expression and accomplishment), while others provide social benefits (like guarantees of employment and minimal physical well-being and safety, a sense of oneness with other living things or even the universe in general). The hierarchical view of societies, in contrast, implies that there are some processes – like spiritual growth, mental health, social progress – that advance in a cumulation of desirable outcomes. In individuals, the hierarchical view implies that a mentally healthy person necessarily one who is loving, treats others well, is socially an activist while internally at ease, accomplishes much in life, is creative, and so on – so that to achieve any of these desired states, all one must do is become mentally healthy. The world would be a very benign place if this myth were true. Unfortunately, the world is what it is – however appealing the myths may be. By perpetuating such a myth in the area of mental health, professionals enhance their acceptance as authority figures.

26 Responses to “What evidence is Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” based on?”

This is something that has bothered me as well. Even the concept of “needs” is a little unscientific (even something as basic as caloric “needs”). Environments vary; people get by with different strategies depending on what’s there and what’s not. The Maslow stuff seems to imply that there’s this happy life available for all humans if they just have these “needs” met – flawed in all kinds of ways.

I’m less familiar with Kohlberg, but I’m guessing Dawes would have the same position (he critiques Piaget on child development, which wikipedia references in Kohlberg’s article). Haidt is apparently a critic due to the over-focus on W.E.I.R.D populations.

Sister Y, I agree that “needs” talk is rather vague. I like a biological definition, like the minimum necessary for an entity to persist. But on the other hand, nothing lasts forever.

Kohlberg’s stages of moral development does not imply that most or all people can reach higher levels if they get thus or such input. It is more of a straight up classification based on criteria. If a person has these behaviors or beliefs, then this is the stage where he is. Kohlberg developed a method (test) to assess moral development. Testing revealed the average man is developed to the level of law and order morality that he describes as level 4. Testing also revealed women is developed to level 3, which is more self centered. This makes sense, of course, but at that point in history, well, poor Kohlberg is not too popular with feminists.

When I started actually digging into the experimental and theoretical justification of modern psychology / psychiatry – stuff that is only presented to grad students, although it’s potentially available to anyone – I realized that most of it is just shamanism for the modern age. There’s a Potemkin village of scientific inquiry concealing the impoverished hamlet of credulity.

Why do you think universities have psychology in the Liberal Arts department?

The science of the human mind is a fledgling baby bird, trapped beneath the hippo of the status quo.

Additional: the higher stages of the “needs hierarchy” are wishy-washy incoherence. But the basic levels are somewhat justifiable: people tend to be motivated by certain physical drives first and foremost.

What makes the hierarchy nonsense is that “high-level” drives have sometimes been observed to be preferentially sought after, even at the expense of physical requirements. People will kill themselves – or at least create situations where their lives are at serious risk or will be lost – in order to maintain their self-concepts.

A place in the tribe – status within society – is as much an inherent survival need as food and water, for example. Lois McMaster Bujold (who strikes me as at least as qualified as any number of philosophers) suggests that a perceived status emergency will induce the same survival-oriented desperation as more concrete threats.

I completely agree – I think the problem we’re getting at is that human psychology only makes sense in the light of evo bio, and so far that’s still pretty taboo in psychology (or so I gather from my reading and from the psych professionals I’m friends with).

I think Freud still has more cred than evo psych in the aforementioned Potemkin village. And Freud massively misunderstands Darwin in about 1000 ways.

Great question. Large areas of psychology (and I think even more so, psychiatry) seem to me have been empiricist wastelands but the good news is scientists seem to have built up a bunch of parallel disciplines practicing hard core science, experimentation, and quantitative analysis.

I think this is especially noticeable in the neurosci/cog sci disciplines.

Cultural anthropologists also seem to me to have done a lot of good work with their ethnographic studies, although I suspect brighter (quant) minds than work in that field could probably do more with their data in aggregate than the typical field cultural anthropologists.

Now that I think about it, areas of psychology and psychiatry may be more the exception than the rule these days for the traditional social science disciplines, in terms of the lack of strong challenges to any principles that aren’t explicitly empirically grounded, which I think is good for the social sciences generally.

A good example of the type of muddled thinking that would embarass a Scott Aaronson, Mankiw or Andrew Gelman (or even a non-academic bright guy like Reihann Salaam) is that recent NY Times piece on “bad seed” kids by a psychiatrist, I think it’s a Cornell Medical professor named Richard Friedman.

Along the way, she had him evaluated by many child psychiatrists, with several extensive neuropsychological tests. The results were always the same: he tested in the intellectually superior range

Hmmm. I wonder what range the mother was in?

My mostly-uninformed guess: poorly-centered parents, lack of even rudimentary discipline, inability to intellectually match child. Possibly he exhibits sociopathic tendencies, but the Razor tells us not to give that too much credence.

But there was one small problem with these explanations: this supposedly suboptimal couple had managed to raise two other well-adjusted and perfectly nice boys. How could they have pulled that off if they were such bad parents?

There’s nothing vague or unempirical about Friedman’s article. In general it’s a soft-peddled popularization of Judith Rich Harris, who is rigorous. I don’t know if she has analyzed surliness/disagreeableness in particular, but she has analyzed many traits, and virtually all of them have around the same heritability (~0.50) and show very little effect due to parents (assuming the parents are remotely normal, as opposed to criminally psychopathic).

I don’t see why you would not expect some children to be surly. Surliness cows some other individuals but causes expensive conflicts with other surly individuals. Therefore we expect frequency-dependent selection. I know there are surly chimps and surly adult humans. Why not children? It is probably found in most or all species.

I think it’s reasonable some kids would be surly. Professor Friedman’s article reeked to me of lack of intellectual rigor and lack of respect for or competence in quantitatively grounded empirical fundamentals.

Hopefully I’m wrong -he is after all a science professor at a major research university.

But quantitative and empirical competence aren’t prerequisites for medical school professor as far as I can tell, even at research institutions. Same with certain other professional fields (law) and arts and letters type fields.

Not sure about the track to business school or architecture professorships.

H.A, I don’t know quite what you mean by “empiricist wasteland”, but Dawes point was that there had actually been a good deal of research, whose authors truthfully described and then gave weak excuses for ignoring in the hopes there some to-be-found reason could explain away the disappointing results. Judith Harris (who I don’t think was a primary researcher herself) had a lot of pre-existing research available to her that she just reinterpreted by dropping the assumption that within-family correlations are due to nurture. Regarding cultural anthropologists, Razib had a post on the contention between them and others who prefer more statistical methods for arriving at generalities here. Matt Zeitlin presents two opposing takes on some of the issues discussed in the aforementioned link here.

Great post by Razib. He clearly has a better mind than mine, although a quibble with this line ” Instead of rebutting Diamond’s thesis with their own general system cultural anthropologists reject the whole project in its entirety. ”

It’s reasonable to say we don’t have the data or analytical tools to creat a general system of phenomenon X at the moment. It’s also reasonable to say we might be able to pull it off, but it’s a bad use of limited resources. The expectation norm shouldn’t be that to criticize someone’s model of a phenomenon we should have to offer an alternative model. That’s about it for my quibble.

[…] the value we ascribe to them Ariely is doing the same thing as the psychologists described by Robyn Dawes. Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Logic of Life vs Predictably IrrationalRisk […]

Questioning Maslow is long overdue principally because it has become an article of faith in management/organisational behaviour etc circles.

Let’s not forget though that Maslow asserted “We have spoken so far as if this hierarchy were a fixed order but actually it is not nearly as rigid as we may have implied. It is true that most of the people with whom we have worked have seemed to have these basic needs in about the order that has been indicated. However, there have been a number of exceptions.” which he goes on to list in his original 1943 paper.

The exceptions aren’t all extremes, although he cites psychopaths and martyrs, but several other categories including the creative who might not have the lower levels fulfilled yet who despite this find some kind of actualisation.

I’ve ordered the Robyn Dawes book so thanks for bringing it to my attention.

I don’t think any psychologists take this seriously anymore, it just doesn’t survive the rigor of research today. It still remains a popular concept among people not involved in research tho, such as business and teachers. I still remember a paper i wrote in high school where the teacher failed me for criticizing his research method and validity.

Maslow was wrong. See the reasons and an alternative model of hierarchy of needs, see Nain, Bhavya, Nain’s Hierarchy of Needs: An Alternative to Maslow’s & ERG’s Hierarchy of Needs (June 14, 2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2279375.

It’s an unpublished working paper and you don’t give any institutional affiliation. That’s certainly no proof you don’t know what you’re talking about, but can you give readers evidence that your paper will be worth taking the time to read?

I am looking at your paper, and I don’t understand why people must behave the same just because they have the same hierarchy. People can have similar goals, yet go about achieving them different ways. People can even attempt to achieve them in irrational ways, I don’t know that Maslow makes the assumption of rationality (there’s no footnote supporting your claim that he does make such a presumption).

I don’t understand the line “a person may desire/wish for self esteem
but has no want/need for it”. What is meant by “need”, or what does it imply for behavior in contrast to “want”?

Your eleventh objection is just a restatement of what has been said previously and adds nothing other than the unsupported characterization that Maslow treats people as robots.

I am not a believer in free will, but I’d still make the argument that Maslow’s hierarchy is compatible with it. Having a pre-defined set of needs/wants does not eliminate free will. We may still react to it in different ways. You must acknowledge that all living things need to feed (or else they die), but that does not suffice to defeat free will.